Fable
Oh, there once was a lady, and so I’ve been told,Whose lover grew weary, whose lover grew cold.“My child,” he remarked, “though our episode ends,In the manner of men, I suggest we be friends.”And the truest of friends ever after they were—Oh, they lied in their teeth when they told me of her!
Words in this poem
- lied n.
- A lay; a German song. It differs from the French chanson, and the Italian canzone, all three being national. [G.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Fable is in the public domain. This text is taken from Sunset Gun: Poems (Boni & Liveright, 1928), English Wikisource; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Dorothy Parker, Fable, in Sunset Gun (1928), text of English Wikisource, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/parker-sunset-gun/fable.html, id L27420.
Form and metre
Fable is 6 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets. The metre is anapaestic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 88%).
See other poems in rhyming couplets, other poems in anapaestic tetrameter.
Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.
Rhyme words, stanza by stanza
The word that ends each line, lettered by the rhyme it makes; a dash is a line whose rhyme the dictionary could not confirm.
- 1 AABBCC toldA · coldA · endsB · friendsB · wereC · herC
Scansion, line by line
Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. Read against anapaestic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Oh, there once was a lady, and so I’ve been told, | 12 | ·····/˘····· |
| Whose lover grew weary, whose lover grew cold. | 11 | ·/˘·/˘·/˘·· |
| “My child,” he remarked, “though our episode ends, | 11 | ···˘/·//˘·· |
| In the manner of men, I suggest we be friends.” | 12 | ··/˘···˘/··· |
| And the truest of friends ever after they were— | 11 | ··/˘··/···· |
| Oh, they lied in their teeth when they told me of her! | 12 | ············ |
The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.